The Blog

Malala Yousufzai: Recovering Well, Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

What happy news! 15-year-old Malala Yousufzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban last October, has been discharged from a British hospital after undergoing a successful surgery to reconstruct her skull and help her to restore her hearing.

In even more happy news, Yousufzai has been formally nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. Her name was put forward by members of the Norwegian parliament because of “her courageous commitment to the right of girls to education.”

On October 6, 2012, Yousufzai was shot in the head and neck in an assassination attempt by Taliban gunmen while returning home on a school bus. Her crime? Daring to suggest that women should be allowed to participate fully in society.

In a video statement released the day of her surgery, Yousufzai attributed her recovery to the many people who have been praying for her and said that God has given her a “new life.” “I want to serve the people. I want every girl, every child, to be educated,” she said. Which is why she has started the Malala Fund for the education and empowerment of girls in Pakistan and around the world.

American feminists take note: this is what a real “war on women” looks like. Not the supposed threat of limited access to abortion and birth control. In fact, our foremothers in the battle for women’s equality here in the United States — women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — abhorred abortion. They considered it a sign (or a symptom, at least) of woman’s oppression and promoted education for women as a way to prevent abortion. In a sad, ironic twist of fate, however, while we now have more women in higher education than ever before, abortion, instead of being more rare, is celebrated as a “right” by modern feminists — often as a means of allowing them further their education.

Malala Yousufzai deserves the Nobel prize, or, at the very least, she’s more deserving of praise among American feminists than, say, the likes of Sandra Fluke — nominated as TIME‘s 2012 “Person of the Year” — who reduce women, once again, to nothing more than “lady parts.”